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I was struck by Coll’s description of President Bush’s addicted-to-oil SOU address in January 2006. In Chapter 20 (“Moonshine”), he quotes a few of the most compelling paragraphs from the president’s speech and called it “a striking and even radical rhetorical decision” for Bush, a recovering alcohol abuser and scion of a political oil-patch family, to use the addiction metaphor.

Said Bush, in part, in the speech: “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology…. And we are on the threshold of incredible advances. So tonight I announce the Advance Energy Initiative – a 22 percent increase in clean-energy research….”

I remember that speech. And I remember our editorial board discussion of it afterward and the push-pull involved in developing an editorial reflecting what we thought of Bush’s idea. Some of my colleagues thought it was more of the same-old-same-old, just another rhetorical call with very little there-there to tether it to any sort of real change. Others felt that for this president at this time to make such a case was significant. Yes, he needed to back his rhetoric up with action, but to dismiss the call as just hot air struck many of us as cynical and uninformed.

As is often the case, I remembered our arguments about this editorial better than our resolution. So I looked up our editorial to see whether our assessment of this Bush speech at the time bore any resemblance to Coll’s assessment of it half a decade later.

Coll’s assessment boiled down is that Bush’s declaration of a national goal (replacing more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025) to liberate the U.S. from Middle Eastern oil imports was significant. He noted that as with most political speeches, the gap between word and practice was vast. (The Bush administration “regularly advertised its willingness to invest federal funds in alternative energy technology research as a means to deflect calls for more immediate policies to combat climate change, such as a national limit on total carbon dioxide emissions or a carbon tax” and so in that sense this particular speech was nothing new and “correctly seen by environmentalists as another effort to finesse the climate issue.”)

But Coll didn’t stop there: “Even so, there was no reason to doubt the sincerity of the president’s wish that capitalism and technological innovation might quickly produce breakthroughs that would make America’s oil dependency obsolete.” While Bush delivered for ExxonMobil on the big policy issues that mattered most to the corporation – taxation, climate, domestic drilling – according to Coll, Bush, to his credit, “also returned again and again to what senior ExxonMobil executives in Irving and Washington believed were fantasies about alternative energy breakthroughs that might lead to some Valhalla of energy independence.”

I found this distinction fascinating. It’s a distinction probably lost on most Americans. But it’s an important one.

Interestingly, it’s not terribly dissimilar to the point we sought to make with our editorial at the time. Judge for yourself:

Kicking the Addiction Bush must follow oil challenge with actions
February 2, 2006

It’s critical that Americans not only acknowledge the threat posed by dependence on foreign oil, but that we embrace the lifestyle changes that will lessen that dependence.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush once again placed on the table the nation’s ravenous appetite for energy, calling America ” addicted to oil,” a stunningly frank comment from a man who grew up breathing West Texas crude.

Is this a Nixon-to-China moment, where only President Nixon, because of his deep roots in the anti-communist camp, could bring about détente? Only if – as Mr. Nixon did with China – Mr. Bush is willing to go to the mat with political capital on the hard energy choices. Otherwise, the result will be more years of energy-dependence chatter without significant accomplishments.

In his speech, Mr. Bush set an ambitious national goal of replacing more than 75 percent of U.S. oil imports from the Middle East by 2025 and finding new ways for Americans to power homes and cars based on emerging energy technologies.

It’s a theme the nation has heard often since the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s, which snapped the auto industry into producing – and motorists into buying – fuel-efficient vehicles. But as Americans are wont, once the crisis abated, the auto industry and consumers returned to wasteful ways.

Mr. Bush’s leadership simply must extend beyond the sound bites of a nationally televised address. In the past, the administration has committed federal dollars to alternative energy technologies, but has done so more as an afterthought, not as an aggressive transforming campaign around energy policy.

The thrust of Mr. Bush’s energy policy remains to increase domestic oil and gas production, provide tax incentives for oil and gas drilling and promote aggressive production in the Gulf of Mexico. And while he spoke in favor of hybrid automobiles, he hasn’t challenged the auto industry to meet tougher fuel efficiency standards. These are not totally conflicting messages, but they are muddled ones.

Energy security is at the heart of American competitiveness; alternative sources are the path to getting there. It’s time to make it happen.

Lots of good points already made by other discussion leaders on this blog about the corporate culture described by Steve Coll in Private Empire about ExxonMobil. A thought I’ll add has to do with the irony I see in a corporate culture that thrives due in large part to the free market principles upon which our country was founded and yet views its interests as separate and distinct from – indeed, sometimes even in conflict with – the country’s interests, particularly when it comes to international relations. This aspect of ExxonMobil’s corporate culture, or rather the extent of this aspect of its culture, surprised me.

Coll notes that Exxon’s size and business model has it functioning as a corporate state within an American state: “Exxon proved across decades that it was one of the most powerful businesses ever produced by American capitalism.” The stats Coll cites are staggering. From the 1950s through the Cold War, Exxon ranked as one of the country’s largest and most profitable corporations, always in the top five of the annual Fortune 500 lists. Its profit performance, Coll notes, was more consistent than other humongous companies, including such touchstones as GE, US Steel, IBM, etc. “Exxon’s revenues grew fourfold during the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its profits would smash all American records.”

Yet the book is rife with examples of how ExxonMobil often views its interests as independent of U.S. interests, especially abroad. Coll doesn’t describe any instances where ExxonMobil publicly takes overt action that is in direct conflict per se with U.S. foreign policy, but there are plenty of examples where ExxonMobil simply turns a blind eye or a deaf ear to U.S. policy when it doesn’t suit the corporation’s business plan.

I understand why this occurs – ExxonMobil has operations in a host of far-flung places where the rule of law is practically non-existent and juggling short-term and long-term cultural, economic, military, security and business interests among competing (often warring) factions within an unstable, third-world country can be more complicated than trying to juggle 10 plates in the air at once. But something about it just doesn’t seem right. The company whose very success is grounded in the freedoms and capitalistic mores inherent to the United States feels no compunction to put the country’s interests ahead of its own.

I find this myopia more troubling than the insularity of its leadership, the magnitude of its profits (which as a percentage of total revenues isn’t nearly as striking as most Americans imagine), its manipulation of climate-change data or its cooking of the books re resource replacement formulas (see my comment under Nicole’s Sunday book club post). It is troubling particularly from a company that boasts of its conservative principles and devotion to ethics, led by a man raised on a code of conduct dedicated to doing “your part to make this a better world.”

Bear with me here. When he signed with the Rangers for a quarter-billion clams, legions of baseball fans immediately put A-Rod in the category of a guy who makes too much money. Period. Nothing could justify it.

The money he collected for playing a boy’s game just didn’t feel right to his critics, not at his new, unheard-of level, and not for a guy with his impassive on-field persona.

Babe Ruth had a famous comeback about making so much more money than the president of the United States (“I had a better year than he did.”) but few ultra-rich sports stars could manage the subject like that.

Certainly not A-Rod. There’s nothing cuddly about him, no endearing quality to bridge the gulf between himself and ticket-buying mortals. He’s all business.

Now Exxon, speaking of all business. Not cuddly, not endearing, and nor does it care to be.

As with A-Rod, people love to complain that Exxon makes too much money. It doesn’t feel right to them, a reality exploited by politicians looking for a villain.

But why don’t they show equal glee in teeing off on corporations that really know how to make money?

I’ll explain. Exxon Mobil was on top of the Fortune 500 list last year with profits of $41 billion, but its profit as a percentage of revenue was in the 9 percent neighborhood.

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